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The Weekly Warhammer Wrapup #9

Progress Report

I wish I had much more progress to report since I haven’t updated you guys in while. Sorry about that. Unfortunately I have not had a chance to even load up Warhammer this entire week. I had a lot of work to do when I did have free time and then my PC’s power supply fried. Anyway, Spazter is sitting nicely at 35. He might stay there a bit, but I think I am ready to head into some scenarios for this weekend. I decided to jump on my Bright Wizard, Cagel, last weekend.

Cagel is a level 11 Bright Wizard who is having way too much fun in Tier 1 oRvR and scenarios. It may be that I have a case of ding-nitis which has evolved into a minor case of alt-itist, but that’s not stopping me from having fun! I managed to fill up his influence bar in Empire and have moved on to Elf to cap there. I don’t think that I’ll be able to cap it before I hit 12, but here’s for trying!

Chatter

Just because I haven’t had a chance to load up the game this week yet doesn’t mean I haven’t been listening to the community. There is talk about fortresses and wards and basically a lot going on in the warhammer community. Warhammer hit 1 Million Characters this week according to Waralytics — Gratz! A big thank you to Snafzg from The Greenskin for the WAR: The Age of Blogging mention on his site. The Greenskin is one of my favorite Warhammer Blogs and I feel lucky to get an honorable mention! Welcome to all the new readers! Also, voting for the 2008 Greeny Awards has opened up. Make sure to head on over and put in your votes (You only have until tonight)!

First things up: Fortress Siege Caps. It seems that while Mythic is fighting the war against server lag and fortress siege crashes, they’ve decided to institute a player cap for fortress sieges. Basically this is an elaborate band-aid that covers up the problem until they are able to fix it. The good thing is, it seems to be working because there have been a ton of fortress sieges lately and only one server has managed to crash since those fixes.

Wards. Way back ago in Oct, when people were just hitting 40 and getting into the end-game, There was a grab bag introducing the Wards System in Warhammer Online. Basically, in order to play the end game effectively you are required to acquire a set of gear with wards on them. The better the ward, the more successful you will be in the end-came epic battles. Jeff from Warhammer at least seems to really, really, really love Ward Gear (at least that is the way he comes off in Paul’s Video Blog). However, the communitydoesn’t seem to like the idea so far. I honestly do not yet have an opinion just yet other than it seems like a bad idea. I haven’t been able to find a Bastion Stair group yet, and the other places to get the gear are lvl 40 dungeons and oRvR. It will be interesting to see where things go on this topic.

WAR! What is good for?

No not absolutely nothing! There is a lot of conversation this week on how to make war’s RvR better. One idea I read earlier today from Regis suggests adding in warcamps as take-able objectives. I actually think that would be really cool and would like to see how it pans out. Another way to do the same thing is, once the zone has flipped, a PQ opens up in the enemy’s warcamp that counts towards flipping the next zone. Regis points out a post by Arbitrary along the same lines of adding in some villages to the oRvR areas. Another really cool idea that I think would be fun to try out. Both ideas are pointing at, hey give us something to plunder, burn, loot, and destroy. Syp joined in and gave his reactions to this stating that he can envision even more:

Arbitrary’s idea has a lot of merit, especially if you expand that idea to include not just little villages, but anything that you can (a) deface, (b) burn, (c) loot and (d) manipulate. What if you captured a BO and then everyone would immediately go on a frantic easter egg hunt looking for little clickies that could give you random loot? Or the longer you held a BO, the bigger a “defense bonus” would appear in your inventory when it finally fell? What if you could tear down the walls of a building, or put fire to the roof, or plant a flag for every guild that took the BO that time around? What if BOs gave you tools that you could wield in oRvR elsewhere — summonable NPC guards, siege equipment, ladders, one-shot abilities, maybe even a two-minute buff that would show all of the enemy forces on your map? What if by capturing a BO, you’d extend the respawn timer on killed enemy players in the zone by 15 seconds, to slow them down? The possibilities really are endless.
That brings me to my next topic:

It’s Paul’s Birthday and We Get a Present

Paul Barnett made a post on his video blog the other day which included some good news from the code team (Jeff and Colin). First off, they are implementing a new zone control system that basically equates to: If you capture the Objectives you will flip zone, or at least will be really close. They’ve also been hard at work on the crashing issues and seems that is working very well. All this seems to be heading our way in Patch 1.11. Might this little change in the way zones are flipped provide all the incentive to defend that is needed? Here is the video:
Wrap Up

It certainly will be fun watching where things go for us in the next couple of patches. Mark Jacobs ensure us that he has something coming soon and Paul’s video definitely wets my appetite for the upcoming patch. I still have several Buddy Keys available if anyone is interested just email at ctiggerf@gmail.com with your servername and side choice. Come to find out they are only really 7 days for free (but you don’t get charged until 30 days are up). Here is some additional reading for this week: